lc_story199.xml

lc_story199.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2004-01-05

I was in the military, preparing to go to work. I remember very vividly that I had my BDU bottoms on, the brown T-shirt, and only one black sock. A fellow soldier came in from next door in my barracks room and told me, "Come in here. Now." The sense of urgency in his voice was so dire that I came into his room with one sock on to watch the impact on his television.

We stayed in that room until the very last moment, until we went to work, to find a colonel at the gate waving people away, telling us all to return to our rooms and get ready, because the Pentagon had come under attack and we might be next.

I worked in a classified and secured facility, that we were not allowed to bring radios into, due to the signals interference and possibility of fixing it to broadcast or whatever. But a lot of us needed to know what was happening. My strongest memory is of people walking up to the building with radios in hand, wanting to know the most up to date information, then tossing them aside as they entered the building, because they couldn't take them inside. That little pile of handheld radios was very memorable..and very sad.

I feel it's struck everyone hard, in the Pearl Harbor sense. But worse, it's allowed President Bush to support measures like the Patriot Act that take away all of our freedoms.